Watching Bernie Sanders Make His Most Radical Claim Yet: That He Can Win

Hours before the first votes are cast, Bernie is lecturing—and his fans are loving it.

DAVENPORT, IOWA—Bernie Sanders shuffled through his papers—an unruly pile of white and yellow sheets that still managed to be slightly neater than his hair. About 15 minutes into what would be an hour-long speech, he was searching for some statistics, and the 1,000 or so supporters here in Davenport who'd packed a second-floor ballroom above a bail-bond shop on Friday night would have to wait.

Sanders' closing argument here in Iowa is less a traditional stump speech than a quasi-academic lecture that verges on a harangue. Cornel West, an actual professor who preceded Sanders at the podium, was all soaring political rhetoric—quoting everyone from Martin Luther King to Sly and the Family Stone. "How sweet it is," West had said, "to find joy in struggle that once again moves the focus away from the elites and empowers working people, poor people, those who constitute the foundation of this nation." Sanders leaves the inspirational uplift to his opening act. He is all about outrage—specifically the outrage of facts.

Finally having located those statistics, Sanders began ticking them off, his voice growing louder—and angrier—by the number. "Youth unemployment for white kids between 17 and 22 and graduated high school: 33 percent! Latino kids: 36 percent!! African-American kids: 51 percent!!!" The crowd let out a lusty boo, and Sanders fed them another statistic—that there are more people in jail in the United States "than in any other country on Earth, including China!" The crowd booed some more. Then Sanders, as he likes to say, connected the dots. "If anybody thinks there is not a direct correlation between high youth unemployment and 2.2 million people in jail, I would think you're wrong," he said. "So here's a radical idea. You want a radical idea?" he shouted. The crowd shouted back that it did. "How about investing in education and jobs for our kids?!" Sanders bellowed to raucous cheers.

The Sanders phenomenon—and how a grumpy, uncharismatic, self-proclaimed democratic socialist has managed to put the fear of God into Hillary Clinton, whose once-inevitable nomination no longer seems so inevitable—is well-documented and fairly chewed-over by now. (For what it's worth, I think John Judis, who argues that Sanders' rise has been fueled by the anxiety of the highly educated middle class and its growing disenchantment with pure capitalism, has offered the best and most comprehensive explanation.) But as I watched Sanders speak in Davenport, it occurred to me that at a certain level his success can be explained by something remarkably simple: He has a gift of being able to make the radical seem like basic common sense.

Those shocking youth-unemployment statistics, combined with the horrendous student-debt interest rates of "six, eight, ten, twelve percent," are a straightforward argument for public colleges and universities to be tuition-free. Which, Sanders conceded, "is an expensive proposition" at $70 billion a year, but will be paid for by a massive tax on Wall Street because, as he explained, "when Wall Street's greed helped nearly destroy this economy, the middle class bailed them out and now it is their time to help the middle class." A $15-an-hour minimum wage is only fair when you consider that the Walton family—which owns Walmart and has "more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the American people"—is currently being subsidized by "you and your taxes," since Walmart "pays wages so low that many of their workers are forced to go on food stamps, Medicaid, and subsidized housing." A single-payer health-care system is necessary because "the United States of America today is the only major country on Earth that does not guarantee health care to all people."

Now, on the eve of the caucuses, Sanders just has to convince Democrats of maybe his most radical proposition yet: that he can actually win the White House. "One of the criticisms that has been leveled at our campaign," he said, "is that our ideas are nice but that the American people just will not go for them, that we cannot defeat Republicans in the general election. And let me suggest to anybody who thinks that, that that is just not the case." He cited a slew of polls that showed him doing better than Clinton in a hypothetical head-to-head race against Donald Trump, and he noted that Democrats tend to beat Republicans when voter turnout is high. "I believe that any objective analysis of the campaigns that are now competing, between Secretary Clinton and us, will tell you that the energy and the momentum is with our campaign," he said. "I believe that we are the campaign that can increase voter turnout."

But even Sanders seemed to harbor some doubts. After urging those in attendance to go out and caucus for him on Monday—and to bring "your friends and your relatives and do some short-term kidnapping of people"—he tried to put things in perspective about what a victory in Iowa would mean for the "political revolution which transforms America" that he's attempting to lead. "If we can win on Monday night," he began, before a woman cut him off by shouting "when." Her call was echoed by others. "Let me change that," Sanders said. "When we win on Monday night," and now he had to wait as the crowd erupted in its loudest cheers of the night.

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